A line in Amelia Torode’s latest blog post got me thinking about how social media and social networks could have an important role to play in improving equality in the workplace.

Despite a raft of legislation the UK’s employment landscape is far from equal and the gap between pay and opportunities between men and women remains far too great.

There are lots of reasons why there aren’t enough women at senior levels and those that are there don’t earn as much, on average, as men. One reason is that at the moment women are disadvantaged because they have gaps in their careers because of maternity leave. I’ve long advocated that one way to improve this is not just to make paid paternity leave available to fathers, but to make it compulsory. That way you equalise the career gaps and as a massive bonus dads get to spend more time with their children.

What Amelia said that made me think was this:

“Through Twitter I feel plugged in and connected to the advertising – digital – comms community that I am a part of so although motherhood is all consuming at the moment I don’t feel cut off. This has to be a fairly new phenomena – the way that social platforms enable non-working mothers to stay in the loop professionally.”

She’s right. Through social media and social networks, both external such as Twitter and internal like Yammer, you can enjoy your family life and stay plugged into your career. Through online trade media you can stay on top of what’s happening in your industry when you’re no longer seeing the magazines that used to come round the office.

I know some people will start complaining about work/life balance and work intruding into family life. But there’s a lot of nonsense about work/life balance with most ‘experts’ putting far more emphasis on work or life, when the really important emphasis is balance. New communications tools let me enjoy more family time, not less. They are not intrusive, but liberating.

So the question is can the internet and social web help to improve the disgraceful inequality in our workplaces?

I attended Communicate Magazine’s Social Media in a Corporate Context conference last week and sat on the ‘judging’ panel for a session which aimed to examine social media newsrooms in the style of an X Factor audition. The other ‘judges’ were Ruth Sunderland (Business Editor of The Observer) and Sam Proctor (Director of Emerging Media, PR Newswire).

As well as being on the panel, I have a lot of experience in creating social media newsrooms for our clients. In fact, two social media newsrooms that the Wolfstar team has implemented were presented for judging!

You only have to search for the #smcc10 hash tag on Twitter to see that the session went down very well. And, I was obviously very pleased at how popular our social media newsrooms for Sony Ericsson (presented by Merran Wrigley, Vice President Head of External Relations, Global Communications) and First Direct (presented by Amanda Brown, Head of Media Relations) were with the audience! The third social media newsroom presented was by Keith Childs for GM Europe.

@juliusduncan: Best Social Media Newsroom at#smcc10 X Factor? I think it’s @first_direct !

@lucynixon: Missed #smcc10 yesterday? I loved Social Media Newsrooms, X-Factor style: http://su.pr/2lhNdt

But, let’s go back to basics and forget all the X Factor related stuff.

To those who haven’t used or created a social media newsroom before, the two key questions are:

• What is a social media newsroom?
• And, why do I need one?

A social media newsroom (or SMNR) is essentially an online centre for all of your information. This can be information that anyone, from customers to the media would want to get hold of. In a typical SMNR you’d usually find news releases, photos, video content, contact details, links to social media assets and the list could go on and on.

You need one because it will completely change the way you and your organisation approach stakeholder engagement and media relations.

Although customers can access your social media newsroom, it’s mainly there for the media, whether this be journalists or ‘citizen journalists’ i.e. bloggers and other publishers of content on social media and social networks. It essentially gives them a way to quickly and easily access the information they need. You can also start being smarter about what you put up there, getting to know the media you want to be in a dialogue with will allow you to tailor your content to their needs making the resource much more worthwhile to you and valuable to journalists.

I’ve already touched upon some of the key functions of a social media newsroom, but here’s how one example of the final product looks:

As you can see, there are:

• Press releases and news articles
• Photo content – using social photo sites such as Flickr and Picassa to make it easier to share and embed photos
• Video content – using social video sites such as YouTube, Vimeo and Brightcove
• Audio content (podcasts) – including listing them on iTunes and other sites
• Social bookmarking and other sharing tools such as Delicious and Digg
• Contact details
• Tags and categories – to make it easier to find information and improve SEO
• Links to other corporate social media assets such as blogs, Twitter etc
• Instructions about how to use the site
• Corporate backgrounders, spokesperson biographies etc
• Search functionality

But, like every other form of activity online, there certainly isn’t a ‘one size fits all’ approach. We work with our clients to find out what they want, how it can work and how best it can be implemented. And it’s definitely not just a case of ‘build it and they will come’. A new social media news room also enables you to totally modernise the way that you do media relations and much of the consultancy we provide is helping in-house press and corporate communications team understand the new rapidly changing demands of journalists and how best to meet their needs.

And there are some stumbling blocks along the way, we have a list of the key components that make up (what we consider to be) a perfect social media newsroom. However, we can rarely achieve the perfect SMNR due to the constraints that most large corporates face. Challenges include getting ‘buy-in’ from other departments and functions, legal restrictions, for multi-nationals – language, geography and time-zones, and corporate IT infrastructures.

For Sony Ericsson we worked closely with its in-house IT department who actually built the social media newsroom for us based on our brief, project management and specifications. One of the challenges here was being able to incorporate all of the functionality we wanted within the constraints of the existing corporate content management system (CMS).

The third social media newsroom presented at the conference was meant to be GM Europe. This was the first social media newsroom in Europe and started in August 2007 as a ‘standalone’ site that wasn’t integrated with the traditional press room on the corporate website. Keith Childs explained that this has now been rectified and the old generic GM Europe social media newsroom no longer exists. Instead all of the social elements have now been added to GM’s various newsrooms for its brands.

As well as First Direct and Sony Ericsson we’ve also built a series of multi-language social media newsrooms for Philips in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland. As far as we’re aware the Philips social media news rooms were the world’s first attempt at creating a suite of multi-language newsrooms.

But, we’re not the only ones who have done this well, here’s a great social media news room from Cisco:

If you want to know more about how a social media newsroom might help your business or organisation then give me or one of the Wolfstar team a call on +44 (0)845 838 7282.

It looks like all reporting of new media innovation in the election campaign by the MSM is now being seen through the same yellow prism of all their other reporting i.e. look for things that make the Liberal Democrats look good/bad and get it in the paper. In the last week we’ve seen breathless reporting of increased searches for ‘Nick Clegg’, increased online donations to the Lib Dems and a boost in members of the Lib Dem Facebook group. That’s in between the Daily Mail stories on Nazis and his parentage!

All this is interesting to a point but is a function of a wider political story that’s reflected in popularity indicators online. It tells us nothing about how clever the Lib Dems are/are not being online and what is working. Lots of PR/social media commentators are bemoaning the fact it isn’t really an internet election and that none of the parties are ‘engaging’ or ‘innovating’ properly online. It’s not as good as Obama they say.

But in Labour’s case they’re nearly all missing the point, just as most of them miss the point about Obama’s campaign.

The ‘sexy’ stuff is largely under the hood. And it’s working. Really well. And business and not-for-profit organisations can learn from it.

Labour recently launched an iPhone app. The initial version was all designed using feedback from its most active online campaigners as the objective on this and everything else Labour is doing in the new media campaign is to produce real world outcomes. That’s why the whole iPhone app was packed with functionality that enabled/motivated them to get out on the doorstep, make phone calls and attending events.

A second wave was launched last week following further requests from the coalface. The learning is if you want to mobilise large numbers of people in a network to do things for you then you need to involve them. Labour has introduced a lot of innovations to mobilise and motivate their network; involving them in designing products, decision making and briefing them on content and news. This is one such example and it’s contributed to some extremely strong success measures. The irreverent and hugely popular website, PopBitch has rated Labour’s iPhone app the most successful out of the main parties in this area.

But also look at the response out in the real world. At a time when you could argue that it’s harder to get people out slogging and making the case for Labour, new media is being used as a motivator, an intelligence tool and a way of helping people share a message with their contacts. Look at the numbers from week one of the campaign: approximately 300,000 a week versus approx. 100,000 a week in 2005, 60,000 phone calls made through the virtual phonebank tool and the number of people sharing the manifesto was also extremely high i.e 60,000 people viewed the manifesto online and 50,000 downloaded the PDF version. Compare this with 8,000 in 2005 going to buy the old paper version.

These figures show that it’s working and the incentive is there to modify it to go much further and deeper.

Tonight I went along to my very first Bootlaw event – and it was brilliant. Danvers Baillieu and Barry Vitou ran a great session on ‘Social Media Attacks’. If you’ve never been to a Bootlaw session I’d highly recommend you do.

In business some people think it’s a big taboo to talk too much about politics or religion, I can’t comment on religion, but I can on politics. Anyone who reads either my business blog or my politics blog won’t be any doubt what my politics are. I’m a long-standing member of the Labour Party and believe passionately that Labour is not only best for the people of the UK, but also for UK business plc.

Some people think that’s dangerous, that I’ve instantly alienated potential clients who are Tories or Lib Dem. I’d humbly like to disagree.

Anyone who knows Danvers or Barry will know they are die-hard Tories. We’re poles apart, never the twain shall meet. Actually, no.  I’ve got far more respect for Danvers and Barry because they are Tories, than if they weren’t interested in politics.

You see, what it tells me is they’ve got passion. They care. They care about more than themselves. They care about what’s best for Britain. I admire that, because that’s me. I happen to think on politics they are deluded, no doubt they think similar of me.

But caring is important. I don’t just care passionately about what’s best for Britain – I care about my clients. I genuinely worry about what’s best for them. And I think Danvers and Barry care about their clients as much as I care about mine.

There are dozens of public relations consultants and solicitors who’ve got brilliant technical skills. But how many would you trust to go the extra mile? Even though I don’t know Danvers and Barry that well I’d trust them to go that extra mile. That’s because of their politics I’ve seen they’ve got enthusiasm and passion – they care.

So no, I don’t think business and politics don’t mix. On the contrary it’s a massive positive. Those that are active in politics, respect others who are, even if they disagree with them. Those that aren’t interested in politics, probably won’t care what you do.

Stuart MacLennan is the first candidate in the UK general election 2010 to be forced to resign / be sacked as a parliamentary candidate because of their behaviour on social media / social networks.

The most interesting aspect of this to me isn’t the political one, but the professional business one. As more and more people use Twitter, Facebook and blogs we know far more about people than we’ve ever done before. The first thing that I do when recruiting someone is check them out online. It’s a matter of few minutes to go back and read hundreds of their previous tweets and find out far more about the real them than any CV, reference or interview could ever reveal.

The implication of this is two-fold.

Firstly, everyone has to lighten up a bit. Not every misdemeanour should be held against you for ever. People grow up. People learn. People change their minds. Everyone (employers, voters, media) needs to become a bit more tolerant and understanding.

Secondly, people using social media and social networks, must start to act more responsibly. This doesn’t just mean by not tweeting stupid things or uploading inappropriate photographs to Facebook. The concept of personal privacy is changing, even if you don’t upload the picture or tweet about your stupid act, someone else might. That means don’t be an idiot in the first place. Start acting more responsibly because people will find you out.

There is a fine dividing line between the two as different people will have different views on what is/isn’t acceptable. I’m extremely anti-illegal drugs and you won’t get any tolerance from me whatsoever. It’s illegal, therefore you’re a criminal. End of story – end of you.

Everyone has to start thinking much more about their personal reputation management and although I haven’t read it yet I suspect Me and My Web Shadow by Antony Mayfield might be worth a read.

MacLennan probably won’t be the last, but it wasn’t social media that was the problem, it was his views. Those sorts of comments would have been just as inappropriate in a pub or a bar, it’s just there wouldn’t have been a public record so proving it and getting rid of him would have been harder.

My daughter Esme (two and a half) loves it when me and Karen read her Beatrix Potter stories. She has a full boxed set that her Granda bought her. She loves turning the pages and she knows some of the stories so well that she even attempts to recite them from memory as she’s too young to be able to read them herself. She knows books are precious and even wants to help put them back on the shelf after we’ve read them.

Imagine my delight to read in the Guardian that there was to be an ‘All new Peter Rabbit for the 21st century’. Brilliant, I thought, a children’s TV show that actually has really strong stories. Then I read the quotes from Chorion chairman Lord Alli and I have to confess that the air turned blue as I’ve rarely read such dumb comments.

What Lord Alli and Chorion mean by ‘updating’ is apparently dumbing them down to suit the lowest common denominator. All they are doing is taking Beatrice Potter’s fantastic characters such as Peter Rabbit and Tom Kitten and creating new and ‘appropriate’ storylines. According to Alli this means: “Peter Rabbit’s father being caught by the farmer and being baked into a pie is not going to be our first episode. We’ll be skipping over some chapters.”

So there you have it, Chorion is planning to make an anaemic and pointless show that will have no resonance whatsoever with children or parents who love Beatrix Potter’s beautiful tales and characters.

On Monday I attended Dell’s excellent B2B Social Media Huddle. One of the hottest topics of debate, both at the event and on Twitter (#dellb2b), was the issue of ghost writing blogs. What I found most interesting was that not only were there legitimate differing opinions, but also there was perhaps even more misunderstanding and misinformation.

Some people thought that the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 outlawed ghost blogs. They don’t. They outlaw fake blogs, which are a totally different issue. Fake blogs are where a brand or agency create a blog that that appears to be independent or from a customer, when in fact it is being written by them.

A ghost blog is where a blog is transparently from the company or organisation, but where the posts have been written by someone other than the person identified as the author. Neville Hobson sparked the debate by stating that ghost writing a blog post was inherently wrong. Some in the audience thought it was OK and likened it to a speech being written for a politician and that people thought was was acceptable and therefore a blog post could also be ghosted. Neville’s argument (I paraphrase) was that a blog post was personal and therefore couldn’t be ghosted.

I’m a realist, not an absolutist. The politician’s speech analogy is a good one, because it actually helps to prove that ghosting can be acceptable. In reality the substance of most political speeches are actually written by the politicians. A good politician will brief a trusted staffer to write the actual words of the speech, but the ideas, tone of voice, emotion and meaning are all the politician’s very own. Step one is the politician, step two is the writer, step three is the politician polishing the writer’s work.

You can quite legitimately create a blog post in exactly the same way. The reality in many companies and organisations is that there are lots of people who only half want to blog. They want to do it, but won’t/don’t because of barriers such as a lack of time, insecurity about their writing ability, worries they can’t think of enough topics etc. That’s where the in-house public relations team or external PR consultancy can help. They can work with an author to create a post that the by-lined author is happy with. That might mean dictating the copy and the PR person typing it and polishing the prose. This doesn’t mean changing the meaning of the post, but can mean turning it into plain English by reducing jargon. Usually, as long as the blog makes it clear that the author had assistance then that’s totally acceptable.

There isn’t just one right way to write a blog. There are hundreds of different approaches that all work, there are also hundreds that don’t. That’s why appropriately experienced public relations people can help an employer or clients to get it right. Unfortunately you too often get the problem of PR people who don’t have the appropriate experience or expertise and then provide bad advice.

Matt Bamford-Bowes, head of social media at MediaCom Beyond Advertising tweeted “it isn’t surprising that companies pay PR teams to maintain blogs. It gives aligned tone of voice and point of view.” I disagree that the role of public relations should be to ensure an “aligned tone of voice and point of view” as that sounds far too much to me like turning it in to corporate or brand speak and the type of thing that marketing people who are used to controlling the message would want to do. If that was the role of the ghostwriter then I’d be opposed to it.

Vikki Chowney was faster off the mark than me and has already blogged about it. In the comments Benjamin Ellis makes a sensible reference to the divide between social media natives and traditional PR/corporate folks:

“It will be a 50:50 split in the big wide world :- social media natives will say “bad bad bad” traditional PR/corporate folks will say “fair game”.

Lots of mature businesses are stuck with “can’t blog won’t blog” senior execs – the temptation for PR folks to ghost blog for them is almost irresistible. That doesn’t make it right of course. The biggest down fall is when the CEO meets a customer and the customer starts to talk to them about what they said in the blog post – big #fail / embarrassment, or if a customer posts a comment and someone else responds as the CEO #biggerfail.”

His example ideally illustrates how PR people shouldn’t crudely simply ghost write a blog, but there are so many other ways we can help clients to blog which legitimately do involve helping to write posts.

Today’s Guardian diary leads with a piece about me Twittering an indiscrete conversation I overheard on the train. It appeared to be an executive from French energy company Total talking about how Total could beat the unions at the Lindsey oil refinery.

In one respect it’s a great example of citizen journalists. Companies have to behave more responsibly because there are so many extra ‘citizen journalists’ watching what they do and ready to expose malpractice.

In reality the reason two national newspaper journalists called me for more information and the Guardian ran it as a diary story is probably because of the number of ministers, MPs, journalists and other PR people who follow me. The papers and unions would still have found out about this without social media. I’d have simply have phoned them to tip them off (waiting until I was somewhere more discrete!)

It would always have been a stupid thing to do to have such a conversation in a public environment like a train carriage (particularly in one that was almost empty and quiet). What social media means is that number of potential witnesses are far more and it is far easier for them to spread the word.

I’ve worked on issues management for client companies who are in the midst of industrial disputes, plant closures and redundancies. As a lifelong Labour Party and trade union member (Unite) I’ve found this isn’t as difficult as you would suspect and it is usually never at conflict with my beliefs. Closures and redundancies are often a necessary evil, but it’s up to the company doing it to decide if they want to do it in a moral and responsible way or an immoral and deceitful way. When I’m providing public relations consultancy it’s to help them do it right and to help ensure that corporate social responsibility is about the way they behave and not simply a publicity stunt.

Jaw jaw is always better than war war. A lesson that the management at Total would do well to learn. Total appears to have managed its relationship with employees, the unions and the media disastrously. It comes across as an arrogant, foreign owned company attacking and undermining the rights of British workers. I suspect Total isn’t as bad as it appears to be, but it’s doing a terrible job of explaining its case and indiscrete, (and one would therefore assume badly trained) executives like the two I heard don’t do anything to help its case.

Today Sony Ericsson is announcing GreenHeart, which represents its commitment to bring to market more environmentally friendly products. It will be announcing more details in a live webcast in the UK at 13:00 (GMT+1) today (for early bird’s that 5:00 PDT in San Francisco, the more realistic 8:00 EDT in New York, 14:00 CEST in Paris, 22:00 EST in Melbourne – you can see your local time here).

There are several ways for you to take part:

We’re using Kyte to live stream the webcast on the Sony Ericsson GreenHeart website. You can use Kyte’s live chat facility to ask questions and the panel will answer as many as they can. If you want to be more involved then you can even embed Sony Ericsson’s Kyte channel on your own blog, website Facebook etc (just click on Get & Share).

You can follow GreenHeart on Twitter, we’ll be tweeting the highlights of the webcast and you can also tweet your questions and comments to @SEGreenHeart or use the hashtag #greenheart.

Finally, as you’d expect from a mobile phone company, you can also take part by phone using Ipadio! Just call +44 20 3384 2144 (it’s a standard UK number so if you’re calling from outside the UK, there may be extra charges) and enter the pin number 2344. You’ll then be streamed live onto the Sony Ericsson GreenHeart website.

Usual disclaimer, Sony Ericsson is a client of Wolfstar.

Over the last few weeks I’ve had several people ask me face-to-face (it’s still the best way to communicate), online and by email, what I think of Labour’s burgeoning new online presence in social media. The latest was a tweet (Twitter message) at the weekend from James Tutt in Microsoft UK’s PR team who asked “@stuartbruce as a Labour and Social Media guy, how do you rate Derek Draper’s foray into the medium?”

It’s hard to reply in 140 characters so my answer of “@jamestutt @derekdraper is new to this and on a very public learning curve, his intention is right (I’ve talked to him), and will get better” didn’t really do the question justice.

Derek Draper’s initiative has come in for a lot of flack from bloggers across the political spectrum, including the A-list Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes (both of whom I’ve met and respect, despite our political differences). I’m not going to single out individuals to dissect and rebut their criticisms, but instead make some general points.

Yes, the Labour Party is very late to this party. But so what, so are most big companies and organisations? The very factors that make social media easy for individuals can create enormous challenges for private, public and voluntary sector enterprises.

It’s all very well for the social media evangelists and the blogging glitterati to get all hot under the collar about “this is the proper way to do social media” and “you must respect the netiquette”, but that’s not how the real world works. Netiquette isn’t set in stone and is constantly changing and adapting to suit the needs of the majority. A good example of this is the number of Twitter early adopters who aren’t entirely happy about the general population invading their private playground and breaking the rules.

Today it’s essential that organisations incorporate social media and online digital communications into the core of their corporate communications strategy. However, that doesn’t mean ditching everything else in favour of the laissez-faire of “you can’t control the message” blogosphere. It’s very easy to talk about how “markets are conversations”, but very different to actually change age-old structures to do something about it.

What we tell all of our clients is that the most important step is to acknowledge the need for change and then identify ways (however tiny) of achieving it. It’s not always possible for a brand (in this case the Labour Party) to “do” social media perfectly. That doesn’t mean to say they shouldn’t do it.

That’s exactly what Derek Draper is doing with LabourList. It isn’t perfect and never will be, but it is and will continually improve, that’s the point. Many of those throwing out criticisms are doing so out of naivety, ignorance or prejudice. It’s ridiculous to think that the party of government can learn about, adapt and respond rapidly to the changes in society brought about by the online world. The new Obama administration has the advantage of being able to do this as part of an opposition campaign that has made the transition to government.

It’s also important to realise that LabourList isn’t intended just for hard-core political bloggers. Far more important is to engage with the far larger number of people online who care about how the country is run and want to see how public services such as health and education can be improved. They don’t care about many of the criticisms of the hard-core bloggers, they just want an opportunity to engage in lively debate with people who care about the same things they do.